Introduction

It's only been a few months since we did our first Athlon motherboard review, Early Athlon Motherboard Review . At that time there were only three boards available for the AMD Athlon processor. Things still haven't changed much. Even though the Athlon processor provides excellent performance and the demand is high for the product, still not many motherboard manufactures have jumped full-steam in to the development and or provide any type of marketing for their Athlon based motherboards (Slot-A). A person must look extremely hard on most of these manufacturers website's to find any literature or promotion for their Athlon supported motherboards.

Athlon Supporters

So what is keeping motherboard manufactures so quiet or completely withheld from providing Slot-A motherboards? Could it be that the Athlon processor doesn't provide enough performance for today's computer users? I think not! Could it be that it costs a lot of money to build a system based on an Athlon processor? Nope! That ain't it! I'm sure the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is working hard to answer this question.

In our Early Athlon Motherboard Review there were only three players who supported the Athlon cause. Included in this list were First International Computer (FIC), Gigabyte, and Micro-Star International (MSI). This is a pretty small list if you compare the Athlon Slot-A supporters vs. the K6 Series Super Socket 7 supporters. Today we are happy to say there are two more motherboard manufactures we can add to the list. BIOSTAR proudly supports the new AMD processor with it's M7MKA motherboard and also quietly yet not so proudly ASUS with it's K7M motherboard. Don't go rushing to ASUS's public website because you will find zero information regarding their K7M motherboard.